Resources
- https://www.ushistory.org/valleyforge/washington/vision.html?srsltid=AfmBOop2uMWVfagkwmgGFHNZgDdY4LJUYxFiD8bmkU3BaA8rpMCuJ9lk
- https://www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/about-this-collection
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/george-washingtons-vision/
- https://newmanlib.ibri.org/NewmanPpt/WashingtonsVision.pdf
Transcript
It’s time to start our service.
It’s good to be here with you today.
I send my greetings to you all. I send special greetings to our friends in Israel. We exchanged some messages this past week, and they are doing well. But let’s keep them all in our prayers—the situation over there is still tense, and we want to pray for everyone’s safety.
If this is your first time joining us, and you wonder who we are and what we are up to:
My name is Charles Paisley. I and most of our listeners here are formerly members of the cult following of William Branham, known as The Message. The Message is a global doomsday cult with millions of members. The Message started here in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and spread all over the world.
I am formerly associate pastor of the second-oldest Message church in the world, right here in the Jeffersonville area. This is a little mission we operate to offer encouragement to those leaving the Message and to take a look at the plain reading of scripture as we seek to wash out of our minds what, for most of us, has been a lifetime of indoctrination.
A few weeks ago, we started our Message Question series. This will be our fourth lesson today. We are dealing with some very specific questions and issues about things we were taught in the Message, especially in the churches from which I come.
I come from the Faith Assembly Fellowship of Churches, and we followed Raymond Jackson’s version of the Message. That version had some unique things in it.
Today, we are talking about something that is not actually in the Bible at all. So, I am not even comfortable calling this a sermon today. I will just call it a lesson or a talk, because there is no scripture we can go to that really has anything to do with this subject.
But I will read a verse from the book of Matthew to you. I invite you to open your Bibles and read this verse with me:
Matthew 24:6:
“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet.”
Let us pray.
Lord God, as we approach this topic today, I pray You help us to understand. It is our desire to know what is right and what is wrong. This we ask, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Introduction
Well, brothers and sisters, we have an interesting topic today: George Washington’s Visions.
Some of our listeners may not be familiar with this, so I will give you a bit of an explanation before we start to dig into it.
George Washington’s vision is a story from the 1870s. William Branham mentioned it on tape a couple of times, just in passing. William Branham seemed to endorse it as being something important when he mentioned it.
In the Faith Assembly Fellowship of Churches, it became a very important teaching after William Branham died.
This supposed vision of George Washington talks about America going through three great trials.
The first trial was the Revolutionary War. The second trial was the Civil War. The third trial was the worst of all.
In the third trial, George Washington is talking with an angel. The angel shows him what is going to happen. George Washington sees these dark clouds come from Europe, Africa, and Asia and cover the United States.
There are all kinds of gunshots and explosions. Then, as the clouds pull back, America is in ruins. But somehow, America just barely manages to survive and then revives as the dark storm clouds fade away.
Then the angel tells George Washington that America will stand forever.
If you like, you can look up the vision and read the whole thing for yourself.
Raymond Jackson, James Allen, and other men in our churches used that vision to say America was going to suffer some terrible conflict. They told us that the dark clouds coming from Africa, Asia, and Europe were immigrants—immigrants from foreign countries moving to America.
They said that things would get so bad that violence would break out. They said that the “red-blooded Americans”—that is the term used, “red-blooded Americans”—would have to rise up and fight off this invasion.
They said it would be violent and bloody, and it would be so bad that America would no longer be a world power. It would leave America weak and poor.
That, they said, is how the Pope and the Beast would rise to power. When America collapsed in the third trial from George Washington’s vision, then the Beast would take over the world as the new world power.
Somewhere in the middle of all that—somewhere—the Rapture would happen. Maybe just before it all started, or maybe after it all started. But somewhere in there, the Rapture would happen.
No one was sure whether George Washington’s vision would happen before or after the Rapture. So, a lot of people were basically doomsday preppers because they thought they might have to survive George Washington’s vision.
Now, there is one tiny shred of scripture they used for all this. That shred of scripture is in the book of Revelation.
In Revelation, it talks about a beast with two horns coming up out of the earth in chapter 13. They taught—and William Branham taught this too—that the beast with two horns was the United States of America. The two horns were the two political parties.
They fitted George Washington’s vision into it because the two-horned beast kind of disappears between chapter 12 and chapter 13. There is no real explanation for why it would disappear. They used George Washington’s vision to explain why the two-horned beast disappeared.
They said America had this ugly civil war, and it was no longer a power. So, the two-horned beast disappeared in Revelation.
That’s the little scrap of scripture they used to fit George Washington’s vision into their picture.
I will say this: we read a lot of the book of Revelation backwards.
I mean that literally. Raymond Jackson preached this series of sermons called the Chronology of Revelation. In that series, he told us the right order to put all the verses in, chronologically.
In that order, chapter 13 came before chapter 12. In our reading, we would read chapter 13—and there is a two-horned beast coming out of the earth. Then we would read chapter 12, and the beast was gone; there was only the earth it came out of.
Reading it backwards, we would say, “The beast disappeared.”
But I want to suggest something to you. Perhaps Raymond Jackson was mistaken.
Perhaps chapter 13 does not come before chapter 12. Perhaps it is the other way around. Maybe chapter 12 really does come before chapter 13. If that is true, the two-horned beast does not disappear at all. We were just reading it backwards.
One more tidbit I will share with you. All of that is interpreting symbols.
We have to seriously ask ourselves whether that two-horned beast was really America. Angels did not come and tell William Branham that. He read that out of his library books.
The idea that the two-horned beast is America comes from the Seventh-Day Adventists, which is probably a cult.
Let me say that again real clear: the idea that the two-horned beast in Revelation 13 is America comes from Ellen White, the prophetess of the Seventh-Day Adventists. She had that revelation back in the 1800s, and William Branham copied it from her out of his library books.
That whole idea is suspect. Between that idea coming from a woman prophetess from the Seventh-Day Adventist cult and us reading the book of Revelation backwards, I dare say we probably had the entire premise of all this totally wrong, where we come from.
I dare say there is probably not a stitch of that which is salvageable. I really think it is probably all garbage.
Let’s come back to George Washington’s vision now.
The truth is, it’s garbage too.
That is what we will talk about next.
George Washington’s Visions
So here is the truth: George Washington’s vision is a fictional story written by a man named Charles Alexander. He wrote the story in 1861, after the Civil War had already happened.
The first two trials in his story were already in the past when he wrote it. He was writing about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War after they had already happened. It is a fictional story. It’s not true. George Washington never actually had such a vision. It is definitely just a story that was made up by Charles Alexander, and we can know this in several different ways.
One way is this: Charles Alexander published the story as fiction. He was upfront that it was a made-up story. He never claimed it was anything but fictional. He published George Washington’s vision along with a collection of other made-up stories. As a work of fiction, it’s a fine story—I don’t really have anything to say about it.
But George Washington’s vision is maybe like Aesop’s fables. There is a good moral to it, or maybe a good patriotic message, but it is still just a made-up story. It’s not real. While we can learn a good moral lesson from Aesop’s fables, we would not go around trying to say they are about real events. It’s like the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise and the hare is a story with a good moral, something we might be able to take from it and learn something. But it’s still just a made-up story.
And it’s the same with George Washington’s vision. It’s not a real thing. It’s just a story—a story made up to share a patriotic moral.
Now I want to give you a couple more ways you can prove the story is made up.
The first is this: In the story, Charles Alexander claims he heard about George Washington’s vision from a man named Anthony Sherman. In the story, Anthony Sherman was a soldier working with Washington at Valley Forge. So we have a name and a place.
Guess what? All the archives from the Continental Army are preserved. Soldiers were all getting paychecks and stipends, and their names were recorded in government records. There was no Anthony Sherman at Valley Forge. There was no such soldier there.
Let me give you another piece of proof that the vision is a made-up story. All of George Washington’s writings are preserved—his letters, his speeches, his diaries, his journals, his military reports, everything. You can go read his journal of everything he wrote while he was at Valley Forge.
All of those documents are easily accessible if you want to take the time to look. There is actually a website with 135,000 pages of George Washington’s letters, writings, and diaries. You can go online and read everything he wrote every day of his life.
There is nothing in any of his documents that mentions this vision—nothing at all. He was a religious man. George Washington wrote prayers. He wrote religious things in his writings. So, it’s mighty strange that he would not have mentioned this vision anywhere in his papers. It’s mighty strange that the only record of this vision would be that he told it privately to a soldier named Anthony Sherman—a soldier who didn’t actually exist in the army at Valley Forge.
I want to encourage you: look up George Washington’s vision. See if what I am telling you is not true, because it is a made-up story. That is the God’s honest truth.
So let me summarize all this for you.
We’ve got a made-up story that is not from the Bible, and we are fitting it into Revelation chapters 13 and 12, which we are reading backwards, using the prophetic interpretation of symbols from Ellen White, the prophetess of the Seventh-day Adventist cult.
That is what you have at Faith Assembly. That is what you have when you talk about George Washington’s visions.
I know you think you’ve got special revelations from God. You think you’ve got something unique and amazing. But the truth is, you just have junk.
What can we call that? We can call that professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.
That is what we can call it. They have been trapped in that cult so long, they can’t even think straight.
They are reading the book of Revelation backwards, then using the words of a false prophetess to define the symbols, and then mixing in a fictional story written in 1861.
It’s just ridiculous.
I will be honest: I never believed George Washington’s vision even when I was in the Message, because I had enough common sense to know it wasn’t in the Bible.
It’s not in the Bible. There is nothing in the Bible to even remotely connect to George Washington’s vision. It is just… nothing. It is absolutely nothing. It is worth nothing. It is false. It has no value, no place in a church.
I hope all this is self-explanatory. George Washington’s vision has no religious or end-of-days relevance at all. It is just a story. To give it any sort of authority, or to use it to make end-of-days predictions, is a totally reckless and inappropriate thing to do.
Using George Washington’s vision for something like Faith Assembly has done is spiritually negligent.
It is biblical, scriptural, spiritual negligence. If a doctor committed medical negligence, they would take his license away. If a parent committed parental negligence, they would take their kids away. If you or I were negligent in our duties at work, they would fire us.
That is exactly what we should do to these men who are practicing biblical and spiritual negligence. We should fire them. We should take away their license. We should not let them practice their negligent ways on us anymore.
That is how we have to label Faith Assembly, and any other group of people who would use George Washington’s vision the way they have. They are spiritually negligent.
They don’t even do their homework, and they just repeat things they hear as though it’s the gospel.
There are wicked men, to this day, who continue to fearmonger with this stuff. Steve Yarhaus, a wicked man at Faith Assembly, was fearmongering with George Washington’s vision not very long ago.
I will have you know that man is a racist. He told me personally that Black people are the serpent seed. He is a wicked, racist man.
Shame on him. Shame on James Allen. Shame on all of them using this made-up story to scare people.
Brothers and sisters, George Washington’s vision is not going to happen.
Do you want to know what George Washington’s vision really is? George Washington’s vision is just the phrase they use instead of “race war.” That is exactly what they use it for.
Instead of saying “race war,” they say “George Washington’s vision.” It’s the code word. It’s frankly outrageous and wicked.
If you are stockpiling weapons and doomsday prepping for a race war, there is something seriously wrong with you, and you need deliverance from whatever it is.
I know for a fact that quite a few people at Faith Assembly are doing just that. I say shame on every last one of you.
The overwhelming majority of people immigrating to America from Africa, Europe, and Latin America are Christians. A lot of them are more devout Christians than people living here already. A lot of them are more devout Christians than people in the Message.
For you to say they are going to raise up some race war against you is ridiculous.
Should our country have limits on immigration? Of course, it should. Should we only let in so many at a time? Of course, we should.
Have they been coming faster lately than we can handle? Yes, they have. Should we send back people who come in illegally? Yes, we should.
But to try and turn all that into some sort of a race war, where they are going to rise up and we are going to have to fight them all—that is absurd. It’s evil.
But that is precisely what these wicked men are using George Washington’s vision for. Shame on them for it.
Everyone listening, I want you to know: Faith Assembly Church, in Jeffersonville, Indiana, whose pastor is James Allen and chief deacon is Steve Yarhaus, is teaching its people race war theology.
Some of them are stockpiling weapons. I have had them tell me these things personally. I will put my hand on a Bible and swear to it in court.
Next time you hear one of those men mention George Washington’s vision in their sermons, I hope you realize what ignorant and dangerous fools they are.
They are getting up there, trying to tell you a made-up story is an end-time prophecy. They are motivating people to stockpile weapons and to be scared of immigrants. That is exactly what they are doing.
All we can do is pray that God will open their blinded eyes and enlighten their foolish minds.
When He does, let’s hope and pray that they will get down on their knees and repent for all the wicked lies they have been teaching for decades.
Preaching a race war is something inspired by Satan. It came from the Ku Klux Klan—right along with serpent seed and a bunch of other racial stuff the leaders in The Message believe in.
A race war is not a teaching of the Bible, and it is not the Word of God.
Closing
Now, I know this has been just a short little lesson today. I will put a couple of links up with the transcripts of this sermon, along with some more information on George Washington’s vision, if you would like to look into it further. As I draw this lesson to a close, if you are listening today and are unfamiliar with the teachings of The Message, I hope this little lesson helps you understand why I call it a doomsday cult.
Let me close here in prayer.
Lord God, thank You for our time together today to examine this topic. Help all of our friends to grow in You—in wisdom and in knowledge. Help us to separate the truth of the Bible from the ideas of carnal men. We pray that You establish us on a firm foundation, in the truth of Scripture, which is the only place we can trust as a solid foundation. This we ask in Jesus’ name, Amen.